In praise of… browser wars

In the beginning there was Mosaic, and then there was Netscape Navigator, and from August 1995 there was Internet Explorer – and the first browser wars began. By 2004 IE had a market share of around 90%. There have always been alternatives: Safari (mostly on Macs), Opera (especially on mobile phones) and Firefox, from Mozilla, a collaborative, not-for-profit foundation. All have their champions and the battle between them has been good for the web, improving speed, stability and security, and keeping the internet out of the hands of one corporate giant. Microsoft has been the loser in the second browser war, which is now under way. In December 2009, Firefox 3.5 is believed to have overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular single version of a browser – though IE in all its forms still has about two-thirds of the market. This week the French and German governments called on web users to drop Microsoft's browser entirely to protect security. The recent assault by Chinese hackers on Google apparently exploited a weakness in some versions of IE – although Microsoft, not surprisingly, denies there is a particular problem with its browser and argues that its rivals are less secure. The dispute comes at a tricky time for the company: Google is busy promoting its Chrome browser, which until now has been a minority player but is growing fast. The battle is on to offer the public the safest and most reliable way of working online – and all free of charge. It is a contest from which web users can only gain.